"In the face of constant change, both in software technology itself and in people's attitudes toward it, long-term software projects need to reinvent themselves in order to stay relevant. I'm encouraged to see the GNOME community taking up this challenge, responding to the evolving needs of users and questioning the status quo," says Matt Zimmerman, Canonical CTO.

According to GNOME, nine years and over 3500 people, including employees from 106 companies, have contributed to the project's code repositories and it is through these efforts GNOME prepares to unleash GNOME 3.0 as it announces today that GNOME 3.0 with the new and innovated GNOME shell UI redesign is now available for download.

Overview image from the new GNOME 3 website

Features for GNOME 3.0 include a sleek new look, built in messaging, distraction free computing, redesigned system settings and more.

Complete with a new GNOME 3.0 website and a newsletter devoted to the GNOME 3.0 release, the GNOME project is poised to bring this new desktop to millions of users around the world as it partners with Novell, Red Hat, other distributors, schools and governments, and user groups. In addition the GNOME community has over 100 launch parties planned to celebrate this, "A revolutionary new user interface and new features for developers make this a historic moment for the free and open source desktop."